After more work and more stress than you'd think would be necessary, gtkmm 2.4 has reached 2.4.0 and API/ABI-stability. And we wrap most of the rest of the GNOME Platform and bits of the Desktop.

This time, maintainership has been more of a shared effort. Martin Schulze is responsible for libsigc++ 2.0 and Christophe de Vienne is the libxml++ maintainer. Bowie Owens takes care of orbitcpp and the libbonobo*mm stuff, but that isn't likely to hit API-stability any time soon, and nobody seems to miss it. Bryan Forbes also deserves special mention because he has put a lot of time and effort into the whole project, fixing lots of important stuff that wouldn't have got done otherwise.

The whole GNOME Platform Bindings 2.6.0 release should be out today or tomorrow. We're just waiting for a couple of modules to be released.

Munich blogs

Googling gave me a Munich Blog U-Bahn Map (that's me up by Josephsplatz) and an aggregator site. They live among us.

Non-english languages can create non-english cultural situations. Outside, in the real world, you have to choose the right form for the right person at the right time, and they'll be offended if you use the wrong one. I have at most a 50% chance of not offending someone.

But in every German workplace the people use either Du (informal) or Sie (formal), though some perverse places do still use both depending on hierarchy/status. I don't think it's that the people are either particularly friendly or standoffish, it's just that choosing one form for everyone removes the stress of choosing the form every time. And then, being impolite is re-defined as using the wrong form, even if the wrong form is the polite Sie form.

There's some blog entries about that here. At the end, someone talks about a company where the people address each other as “he”. That makes me smile, because I think life should be more like quirky short stories.